Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
I think the metaphor is deceptive, not clarifying - it recasts the various actors in this conflict into roles they do not actually occupy.
This contradiction seems to be Trump's typical MO: https://scholars-stage.org/on-bombing-iran/
This should be taken as evidence that the Trump administration has no coherent plan, especially given that the stated rationale seems to change hourly, but we can look more broadly at their past record and see that current US leadership is not motivated at all by humanitarian concerns (corroborated by the rising civilian casualty estimates from these strikes, which will only continue to rise, alongside Hegseth's remarks earlier today).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1d ago
The US sees it more like intervening in a messy domestic dispute
I don't really see any evidence of this. The current US administration rejects humanitarian concerns as a basis for foreign policy and has explicitly disavowed the idea that this is a regime change war.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
It probably helps that Iran has been shooting at French and British targets as well, plus Middle Eastern countries that aren't Turkey or Israel are in the bottom rung of the West's "Are you a real country with real sovereignty?" tier-list.
The US can completely devastate most countries, even large ones like Iran, without putting a single boot on the ground
This isn't new. Very little of this is new - the US has been in a massively dominant conventional position since the end of the Cold War. The reason we haven't done stuff like this in the past (except for when we have) is that it isn't particularly useful most of the time. Even in dictatorships, individual leaders are usually fairly replaceable, as we have seen in Venezuela (and will likely see in Iran), and actually achieving lasting results tends to require putting troops on the ground to enforce your will (as we've seen with the failures in Yemen) and a real plan for victory (such as was lacking in Afghanistan).
Precisely because the US has overwhelming conventional dominance, the number of foreign policy problems we have than can be solved by the quick, sharp exercise of conventional force is pretty limited. Nobody tries anymore because they know how it's going to go.
But right now, as an American watching the news, I'm feeling a bit drunk on national power.
This is, in fact, the problem. A lot of "isolationist" sentiment in the US is a mixture of short-attention span and anti-internationalism. The reason US public turned against the Iraq War wasn't because of some general opposition to getting involved overseas, but because it was a miserable slog that they felt had been entered into under false pretenses. A lot of them recover their adventurous spirit the moment they get to see the US military absolutely pasting the latest guy dumb enough to stick his head up. And lose it again when it turns out (as mentioned) that brute force actually has pretty limited utility against modern problems.
The actual military problems the US has tend to be intractable (terrorism, piracy, and insurgency) or really boring (ship building, munitions production, diplomacy). The reason people are correctly calling Trump a retard for threatening to invade Greenland is not that the US couldn't take Greenland but that the whole affair reflects a kind of short-sighted thuggishness that reflects poorly on Trump and his supporters.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
even the hardline hawks expected that a war with Iran would be tough
They were talking about invading Iran. I don't think there was ever any question that we could bomb Iran with impunity. Maybe they were expecting need a bit more SEAD, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone suggest that Iran would be able to directly contest the air.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
I think it's good, actually, when people push back on their government killing civilians for bad reasons, and the bigger problem by far is that we're much too quick to accept nebulous assertions of national security as a justification for collateral damage. If the US were intervening to stop the IRI from massacring protestors, the comparison would have some bearing, but that isn't what is happening.
Notably, there was fairly little consternation over coalition-inflicted civilian casualties in Mosul or Raqqa because it was generally accepted that ISIS was Really Bad and coalition forces were trying to stop them (even if not for purely selfless reasons) and taking reasonable precautions while dealing with an adversary using human shields. US airstrikes more broadly were criticized because there was no clear aim/end beyond killing terrorists and the target selection was often incredibly careless/callous. By contrast, this current campaign looks like gunboat diplomacy at best.
I think it's a sign that most westerners are fundamentally unprepared to defend their societies from aggression and stagnation.
I think it speaks more to the damage the Iraq War (and to a much lesser extent Libya) did to the credibility of military interventionism. Many, if not most people have no faith that these actions aren't going to squander a bunch of money and lives for no worthwhile outcome.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
In related news, not everything is lost. Here is how Iran can still win. When all human wit and wisdom failed, listen to the cat girls.
This is a bit. Even KR isn't that retarded.
The failure case is that the US spend a bunch of money and depletes materiel stockpiles (not to mention reputation) to bump off a decrepit and ultimately replaceable theocrat while losing any chance of a negotiated solution to Iran developing nukes. If the US isn't going to mount a ground invasion, we're left hoping that either a revolution finally succeeds or that they can keep the IRI nuclear program in check forever with nothing but air raids.
The time to bomb Iran was a month and a half ago, but we were too busy with Operation Caribbean Shakedown.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
I'm not going to pretend to have a high confidence prediction of what will happen; merely what probably won't happen. Which is to say, it is unlikely that the outcome will be that the IRI regime will be toppled and replaced with a US-friendly one or that Iranian nuclear ambitions will be put decisively to rest. I think it is likely that whatever does occur, Trump will claim massive success, even if it is a massive shitshow.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
While we're inching closer every day, I don't think there's a major constituency for bombing Alabama yet.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Did the crackdown with 30k dead kill all the individuals or groups able and willing to engage in risky, intensive protesting? Did they break the will of most of those wanting the regime's downfall? Perhaps not.
Well, they stopped protesting, so they are likely quite demoralized. And an airstrike campaign is unlikely to resolve the fundamental issue, which is that the regime's enforcers have weapons and anti-government protestors do not. As long as the Iranian government can find people willing to shoot protestors, the government will be able to manage internal dissent. And, as you say, Iran is a big country. A lot of that population is pro-government. It doesn't even need to be a majority, just enough to staff the instruments of repression, a hurdle they clear easily.
The track record of airstrike campaigns alone achieving decisive results is basically nil, and any plan which entails "and then the people will rise up" is begging for embarrassing failure at best and bloody disaster at worst. It's possible this will all succeed, but the historical record is against it.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Donald the Dove strikes again.
This seems... incredibly late to capitalize on anti-government sentiment. If you were going to try and provide military support to protests/deter their violent suppression, it probably would have been more effective to do it before they all got killed.
In the meantime, I don't see how a bombing campaign is going to succeed. I don't have anything sympathy for the Iranian regime, but if you're going to go to war you can't just lean on "my adversaries are evil" to justify it. If you don't have a credible plan to succeed you're just squandering money and killing people without purpose.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
What's really fascinating about this whole affair is that it really illustrates the whole "Trump lies like a used car salesman" idea that was popular around here a while back. Over the past two days, it's been regime change, definitely not regime change, degrading Iranian capabilities, getting compliments for Trump, preempting retaliation triggered by Israeli strikes, and protecting the US/Israel from an imminent threat. And I've probably missed some other statements coming out the administration's senior leadership. It's all nonsense, but I don't know that it's meant to be believed so much as to disorient critics.
My gut instinct is that they thought they were about to pull a repeat of the Maduro operation or Midnight Hammer. Everything was going to be over and done too fast for the haters to do anything but wring their hands. The Iranian government was going to be cowed into submission and make a much more favorable deal than the one Trump tore up. Only it hasn't been quite as clean or decisive as anticipated. We'll see how it ultimately shakes out, but I wouldn't be shocked to see them double down for fear of looking weak.
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